The joyful authenticity of children never fails to capture our attention or warm our hearts. Yet we rarely give ourselves the same opportunity to be joyful, impetuous, genuine, and playful at work. Instead, we retreat behind self-aggrandizing egos, dreary hierarchical responsibilities, scripted bureaucratic roles, and closely guarded communications. We will ourselves to ignore or suppress the parts of ourselves that are trying to be free. Unfortunately, the self that learns to survive in these conditions is a colorless being. We are like crabs who carry the shells we grow at work during the rest of our lives. How sad it is to realize how much of ourselves we set aside at work and how little we make available to others, or even to ourselves.
The difficulty is that, in the short term, living authentically requires greater energy and courage than retreating into dullness and insensitivity, particularly in organizations that place a premium on superficiality, posturing, and blind acquiescence. In rigidly hierarchical organizations, those who behave authentically risk being marginalized or losing their jobs. Inauthenticity is encouraged by the use of bureaucratic, superficial, tedious, worse-than-useless feedback systems that stimulate defensiveness and pretense, and are widely perceived as isolating, undermining, and threatening to self-confidence. Sadly, these workplaces are dangerous for those who want to learn from their mistakes. They actively reduce responsibility and discourage leadership. Yet it is clear from research and elementary logic that authenticity contributes directly to increased motivation, organizational capacity, and economic success.
We first become inauthentic by uncritically accepting other people’s judgments about who we are. We are reduced in families and schools to a series of labels. We are “unpopular,” “bad at math,” “unable to carry a tune,” “unable to handle stress,” or “poor at follow through.” These early examples of hierarchically imposed feedback reveal how easy it is to capitulate to someone else’s image of who we are out of self-protection, laziness, or lack of self-confidence. Yet the power of these judgments is not that we are told we are incapable of something, but that we believed it and stopped trying because we did not think we could succeed.
Yet negative assessments can be heard not as verdicts but as challenges that encourage us to prove them wrong. Thus every external version of who we are is false because it is merely some single person’s version—yet true because it reveals an internal disabling belief that, once shattered, can wake us up and make us more curious about who we actually are. Because each of us can get better at anything we choose to do, the way we respond to feedback reveals more about our self-confidence and skill in interpreting critical input than it does about our innate abilities. We can all learn, improve, and change every aspect of our lives. All we have to do is want to do so.
Moreover, a primary characteristic of leadership is authenticity. We are all drawn to authentic leaders. We admire them, count on them, and wonder what mysterious quality attracts us to them. Yet their secret is easy to discover: they are clear about who they are. They are in touch with their own inner truths. Leadership is ubiquitous. It exists at every organizational level through a myriad of roles and a wide variety of expressions and modes of operating. To become leaders in our own work lives, each of us needs to develop our capacity for authenticity. Only when we wake up ourselves, develop a clear sense of who we are, and act with integrity, can we begin to ask the same of others.
Cultivating Congruence
Democratic organizations require employees who are not merely awake but willing to make their awareness and authenticity congruent with their values and take responsibility for improving their work lives. Awareness and authenticity allow us to translate our intentions into congruent behaviors and committed action. Until awareness translates into commitment and commitment into action, we can delude ourselves into thinking we are aware and authentic when we are actually only playing it safe. But in our willingness to risk change, it immediately becomes apparent how far we have traveled and how far we still have to go.
Congruence is a quality of connectedness or unity between our thoughts, feelings, words, tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, and actions. When we are congruent, others see us as credible, trustworthy, and understandable. They feel respected and responded to, and we feel open and connected. Lack of congruence, on the other hand, consists of sending mixed, contradictory signals. When people are perceived as incongruent, their relationships become frustrating. Their negotiations turn into a series of “power plays” and win-lose propositions with little opportunity for mutually satisfying collaborations and partnerships. Congruence is “walking the talk.” When we are congruent, our behaviors match our values, we are honest with ourselves and others, we listen to feedback for indications that we are sending mixed signals, and we are willing to take committed action to avoid creating false impressions. We experience ourselves as integrated, whole, and deeply consistent.
When people lack congruence and failures occur at work, they resort to blame, lie about their roles, divert attention to other issues, silently remove themselves from the line of fire, accuse others of misunderstanding or miscommunication, go on the offensive, blame the system, deny involvement, belittle coworkers, subvert the process, and demean leaders as incompetents. On the other hand, when they are congruent there is no reason to dodge, deny, distance, or defend themselves against responsibility for what they did or failed to do, and no one left to blame.
Cultivating Committed Action
Commitment is an indicator of our proximity to the problem. The more removed we feel from a problem the less committed we are to solving it. If we are not concerned about processes, relationships, and values, we are not willing to participate in making them right. Commitment measures the degree of our authenticity and awareness, and is reflected in the actions we are willing to take. It signifies ownership—not simply of outcomes but of processes, relationships, and values.
In waking up, we recognize that every action is a choice and we own every one of our choices, including the choice of not choosing. Committed action involves taking responsibility for our choices and the effects they have on others and on our environment. Initially, it does not matter whether our choices are conscious or unconscious, well-intended or hostile, accidental or on purpose, petty or grand. What matters is that we own them and do not diminish or deny their consequences.
Eleanor Roosevelt reminds us that in a democracy, we are all responsible for our choices, which are the only accurate confirmation of our personal philosophy: “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words, it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”
Congruent, committed actions both require and reinforce awareness and authenticity. They encourage and express leadership and model for others how to be responsible and true to themselves. They encourage closure by allowing us to feel complete about what we want and what we have done. They help us discover who we actually are.
What Wakes Us Up
What, then, can be done to release ourselves and others from the hypnotic trance in which we spend much of our working lives? In truth, anything can wake us up at any time: a casual comment, a chance occurrence, a moment of idle reflection. Most of us, however, are awakened with a start by events that shock us out of our complacency, or by an experience of pain or suffering. For example we may be awakened by
• A sudden awareness of death. When we receive a clear warning of our imminent demise, as when we suffer a heart attack, or learn we have cancer, or hear about a tragic loss to someone close to us, or are touched by a collective tragedy such as occurred on September 11, 2001, we may realize that we have not lived our lives as we wanted.
• A horrible humiliation. When we suffer shame or humiliation as a result of some action we took that lacked integrity, we may recognize that our blunder asks us to empathize with the suffering of others and act more humanely.
• A personal failure. When we fail, or are tempted to sell our souls